Editor's Introduction: Who would have thought that Wordle, this anagram game can be popular for so long? On the one hand, this web game is easier to get started, which reduces the user's experience threshold; on the other hand, Wordle also comes with social attributes. In this article, the author has made an interpretation of the explosion of wordle web game, let's take a look.
A few months ago, I didn't expect wordle to explode around the world.
A few months later, I didn't expect Wordle to be red until its 300th day, and it was so strong that it was quite unreasonable.
Before it happens, few people on the planet can predict in advance: Wordle, a confusingly simple English word puzzle game, will define the entire spring of 2022.
In January, in less than 10 days, Wordle's user base soared from 300,000 to 2 million, and the spread has since become uncontrollable. Morning Consult, which tracked the game at the time, announced that 14 percent of U.S. adults were playing the game, and Wordle was becoming the new favorite of millennials.
Image source Morning Consult
In April, when Twitter Gaming released its first-quarter review of 2022, it was found that Wordle was already at number two in the "Top Ten Talking Games." If this outlier is discarded, the list will be taken over by big factors such as "Original God", "Final Fantasy", "Eldon's Law Ring", and their team size is a hundred times or even a thousand times that of "Wordle".
In the circle of mobile games and terminal games, "Wordle" opened with a browser seems so out of place. Every curious glance thrown at it makes this explosive myth seem more and more brilliant. Today's "Wordle" has a dreamy temperament decorated with millions of dollars, and it also comes with a successful narrative that even outsiders can't help but stop and revel.
This is a modern fairy tale belonging to the 21st century.
First, the miracle of the square
The developer of Wordle is josh Wardle. On the day he named the game with his last name, Wardle had no idea what an extraordinary fate Wordle would have.
The Spring 2022 GDC (Game Developers Conference) is the first time the event has returned to the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco since the outbreak of the pandemic. Under the California sun, more than 10,000 attendees came to this land of inspiration.
Considering the big shock brought by Wordle, many people are looking forward to Wardle's sharing session. However, when a group of professionals in the circle turned their eager eyes to him, the father of the anagram game with millions of players said: "I don't consider myself a game developer at all, I want to admit this first." ”
Wardle doesn't feel like a speech can tell the story of a game's creation. If he had to generalize, he would say that he had just done a series of "things that should not be done according to the rules", and Wordle was born.
Wordle's rules are as concise and straightforward as its interface. Players have 6 chances to enter a 5-letter word, narrow it down based on each decision, and guess the answer.
Black means that the letters are not in the answer, yellow means that the position is wrong, and green means that the position is correct
The peculiarity of this game is that players can't break through the levels indefinitely as usual. Every day, players all over the world can only face the same problem at the same time, and when they are done, they have to wait for the next day to refresh.
Compared with large-scale online games that are eager to get people online day and night, Wordle can occupy at most five minutes of users' time, and if you are lucky, maybe two minutes is enough.
By this point, the introduction to Wordle itself is all over, and you can imagine how simple and light it is. On November 1, 2021, the game had 90 users in a single day — and to be honest, that's a decent hit for a super mini-game for families to pass the time.
But the story soon went beyond everyone's expectations. In just two months, wordle's number of players soared from 90 to 300,000, and by mid-January 2022, the number of users was approaching 3 million.
What's more exaggerated is that there is an old game in the Us App Store called "Wordle!", which was outside the 400th place in the free anagram game list on December 22, 2021, and on January 21, a month later, Wordle! was sent to the first place in the overall list by confused and enthusiastic players.
Wordle!, 2022/01/01 – 2022/04/23 Ranking Trends, Graph Source Seven-Wheat Data
Since then, "Wordle!", which accidentally bumped into the traffic of "Wordle", has begun a 3-month journey to dominate the list. It outlined a daunting straight line on the leaderboard, and it still doesn't see the decline today.
As we've already discussed, Wordle's gameplay is so concise that no one would have thought of it as an object of study. But after it became a big hit, the carnival itself became a phenomenon-level proposition.
Many practitioners attribute Wordle's success to its strong social properties.
Interestingly, this fantastic social effect didn't originally come from Wardle's design, but from a player's fantastic idea. Last December, a user from New Zealand came up with a special way to share Wordle — replicating small colored squares in the puzzle interface.
The advantage of this is that it will not reveal the mystery of the day, and it can also show a personalized guessing process. Wardle quickly noticed the brilliant idea, saying, "I've seen a lot of players jump out and do the same thing, and they spend their time opening the emoji keyboard and spelling out their own grid. So I put this sharing feature into the game. ”
Image source Twitter
From that day on, the little square conquered Twitter.
People's homepages are dotted with yellow, green, and gray-black squares marked with common mysterious numbers—the number of Wordle titles and the number of opportunities to try. Uncommented colored squares are like a subcultural code, and only the knowledgeable know exactly what you're sharing. The people in the unknown are full of doubts, and the people on the airwave tacitly praise.
Image source Weibo
The strange sense of mystery and interactivity has allowed the small square to spread to more platforms and more countries. Wordle players' sense of community is built in the process, with endless paintings and memes around small squares.
Graph source network
Consumer brands, sports teams, and Internet celebrities who have detected the popular trend have played the game, and even Google officials have specially made a unique Easter egg for the search term "Wordle" - various small squares have formed the "Google" icon after several guesses.
Image source Google
Siobhan Murphy, Twitter's head of communications, said that from Nov. 1 to Jan. 13, there were about 1.3 million tweets about Wordle on Twitter. Until January 14, 2022, the conversation about Wordle grew at an average daily rate of 26%.
The ubiquitous little squares build the explosive myth of "Wordle".
2. Prologue and Ending
The legend of "Wordle" reveals drama from beginning to end.
One of the claims that many media outlets talk about is that Warddell's girlfriend loves crossword puzzles, so he designed Wordle, hoping to help his girlfriend spend the tedious time at home during the epidemic.
But the birth of Wordle doesn't just come from this layer of romantic pink aura.
According to Wardle, the prototype of Wordle dates back to 2013. At that time, Wardell was very fond of Zynga's mini-game Words with Friends. Wardle wanted to try to make a word game of his own, and he remembered another game he had played as a child: Mastermind.
Puzzle board game Mastermind, graph source network
Under Mastermind's rules, the player is tasked with guessing a string of colors, and each operation receives feedback – yes, this undoubtedly inspired wordle's gameplay design.
When the pandemic era arrived, Wardle picked up the idea again. The next thing he had to do was to sift through the vast ocean of languages a batch of words that were suitable for use as answers.
"When you're playing Wordle, it's very, very important that the answer has to be a word that you're likely to hear," Warddell said. This is especially true for those who are experiencing the game for the first time. If the answer is so jerky that you find that you've never heard the word before, then "you'll most likely feel like you've been played by this heinous game." ”
At first, Wardle tried to complete the screening with the help of an algorithm, which is undoubtedly a more conventional path. Unfortunately, Wardle was not satisfied with the result, so he quickly abandoned the solution. He ended up choosing a clumsy solution: working with his wife to categorize each word into those he had heard, those he didn't know, what he sounded familiar...
13,000 words slid into the funnel, artificially sifted through an answer sheet, and then an anagram game was born. Of course, even though anagram culture has a broad historical audience in the English-speaking world, that doesn't mean it's a brilliant business choice.
"I made a word game — the kind of genre that people think shouldn't be chosen." Wardell described his feelings this way: "I don't think that when people imagine an extremely popular and exciting game, they never first think of the mediocre genre of word games. This fact makes me feel a little sad. ”
Fortunately, Wardle still believes that word games are not useless, quoting the literary theorist Terry Eagleton: "Language is the air I breathe all the time." ”
What Eagleton meant by this is that humans are language-dependent animals. Everyone's experience is mediated by language, and everyone's thoughts are presented through language, and words are an integral part of it. Wardell explained.
Before entering the public eye, the original player of Wordle, in addition to him and his wife, was only the family around him. Although the viral sharing feature was not yet born, Wardle was aware of Wordle's innate social nature. Because at that time, the reason for family members to start daily conversations was often a brisk sentence: "Oh, I solved today's Wordle in three minutes." ”
Wardall may have vaguely touched something by then, but he hadn't really read the meaning of this sharing. It wasn't until much later, when the family-based sharing model evolved into a sharing system based on the entire Internet society, that he understood wordle's true potential.
Graph source network
In areas where English is spoken, the basic gameplay of Wordle is almost without thresholds, so men, women and children can get started at a very fast speed. Trial and error form the core fun of the game, which validates Wardle's good impression of Mastermind.
On February 1, 2022, The New York Times announced the acquisition of Wordle, which cost seven figures. The company says Wordle has accumulated more than 500 million views since its launch. They hope to grow their digital subscribers to 10 million by 2025.
Wardell said: "I enjoy the process of making games, but I am not interested in running a commercial game. I position myself as an artist, and I enjoy the process of creating new things, but the things that operate commercial properties really don't appeal to me. ”
Artist Wardell sold Wordle in this way, but the aftermath of "Wordle" continues, and the story gradually derives more butterfly-like veins...
In Lincolnwood, Illinois, Ms. Denyse Holt, 80, like many young people, has developed the habit of playing Wordle every day. Usually, she insists on sharing Wordle results with her daughter every day.
Last weekend, Ms. Holt's home was invaded by a man in an unusually mental condition. Her daughter, who lives in Seattle, realized that her mother wasn't sharing Wordle as usual, so alertly, she quickly called the police. In the end, Ms. Holt was successfully rescued.
In China, some local developers have made changes to the gameplay of "Wordle" and created "Handu" with the goal of guessing idioms. Chinese players who are not familiar with English words can also experience a Wordle-style happiness in their own language air.
Guess the idiom of "Han Du", the source of the "Han Du" official website
Today, a large variety of Wordle-like games are shining in niche circles, because fans of different themes have their own unique "languages".
At The New York Times, administrators conducted a cleanup of Wordle's word list to weed out a range of vulgar and inappropriate words, including defamation and certain sexist terms.
After cleaning up, players receive a prompt to "not in the vocabulary list" when spelling certain words, and The New York Times hopes to encourage people to imagine something more suitable for all ages.
In the App Store, a large number of copycat games under the banner of Wordle are swindling. Apple quickly took a stand, and in addition to keeping the old game Wordle!, it vigorously banned a number of counterfeits. Some pirated game developers have also encountered a number of enthusiastic netizens on Twitter.
Fake Wordle, source App Store
At the top of the leaderboard, Wordle! adds a Wordle-based standalone game mode to the game. Cravotta, a developer who unexpectedly made a huge income, got in touch with Wardle and decided to donate all of the game's proceeds to charity.
Eventually, Kravolta negotiated with Wardell and chose Boost Oakland, a charity designed to mentor young people in Oakland, California.
These stories form another moving branch of fairy tales.
Third, the original meaning of the anagram
Across the ocean, Wordle celebrates its 300th day. After xiao Qin, a graduate student, finished the day's "Wordle", he took the time to click into the "WordleWordle" group of Douban.
"WordleWordle" is not a large group of traffic, the topic is very monotonous, most of them are netizens sharing the block map of the day, and the comment area is all about xiaoqin such enthusiasts in solitaire interaction.
In Xiao Qin's impression, there were very few people who complained about the difficulty of the topic, and everyone complained about their bad luck at most: "It's too dark, the first two times it was a piece of ash." The meaning of this sentence is that the initial random attempt of a question is all empty, and it does not bring too many clues to the subsequent guessing.
Obviously, "Wordle" is popular to this day, and there are not a few people who have found out the solution to the problem. Old players more or less have their own habit of "starting style". Although media reports sometimes summarize the "most advantageous opening words", Xiao Qin feels that it is "really unnecessary".
This is very different from the popular online games nowadays. In the hottest competitive games, players are stimulated by a burning desire to win or lose, investing time or money in order to climb one step further on the endless ladder of conquest.
But Wordle never really provides such soil. The competition is still there, but the limit is only "today I am one step less than everyone else". Every day, the whole world has only one question to pass the time, and you don't go up and you don't get angry. "Just have fun." Xiao Qin summed it up like this.
She clearly remembers that a friend once forwarded her a word list, which was said to be the "god of the extranet" from the code of the web page. It is thought to contain all the answers to Wordle, and some people have even designed an algorithm that can accurately lock the answers.
But Xiao Qin had never opened the watch. She said: "It's not interesting. ”
Image source WordleWordle Douban group
Wordle is simple and special. When Wardle first designed it, he knew he didn't want to make an endless game, nor did he want players to complete one goal and move on to the next, endlessly. Wardell said: "I just want a game like this, it only takes you three minutes a day, that's all it takes. ”
Sometimes, users on Twitter will give feedback criticizing the parts of the game design that are not "motivated", such as why can't the game link be placed in the grid corresponding to the emoji, which is not easier to spread?
Even Wardell admits that block sharing is somehow too obscure, but he still disapproves of embedding a game link on a sharing page. "On the one hand, the current block grid has a beautiful, concise beauty, and if I had to add a link to a web page here, I personally think it would become a lot more lame."
"On the other hand, if the game were to be shared by players just for more people to play, I would feel very uncomfortable... Why do I encourage people to actively share? Is it because they really want to do it? Or is it because it's more beneficial to the game? Wardle said.
For professionals, Wordle is social fission, minimalist gameplay, and invisible "starvation marketing." People interpret the success of Wordle in a post-conscious manner, and put dense annotations on it.
But the other side of the story is that Wordle's popularity wasn't designed, predicted, expected. It's completely free, has no ads, no in-app purchases, and doesn't follow the profit logic of commercial products from the start. For those parts that many people have bothered to analyze, Wardle admits: "Frankly, I didn't mean it. ”
Wordle is like a small, very shallow glass. It's designed to have a limited capacity, it's impossible to expand like other games, and it's never possible to grow a massive, all-powerful intelligent robot from the bottom of a cup.
The good news is that sometimes people really just need a shallow sip of water.
Warddell remembers a player sharing a video of a group of third-graders gathered in a classroom. The children started their brains on Wordle and worked together to guess the words. At the moment when the mystery was finally solved, the children erupted into a burst of joyful cheers.
4. Epilogue
Few would believe, if not witnessed, that a web game based on English anagrams can be dizzyingly popular in the 21st century.
In "Wordle", you can see many eye-catching elements: the beginning of unintentional willow insertion, the unimagined popularity, the extravagant acquisition, the eye-catching interlude, and finally the end of the reunion.
But if you put aside that layer of seductive frosting, wordle's posture is clearly contrary to this era of sound and light painting.
Wardle is a good husband, a former Reddit software engineer, and an artist who loves to create, but is not a game developer who chases user data. At first, he just wanted to make the world's favorite players, such as his wife, happy with this simple word game.
As we all know, experienced game developers often know what to do and what not to do. Wardell also made a list of "what you shouldn't do according to the truth," seven of which are listed below.
First, do a word game;
Second, only once a day is allowed to play;
Third, play on the web, not the app;
Fourth, use crappy URLs;
Fifth, this game does not know how to sell itself;
Sixth, do not want to carry out commercial operations;
Seventh, don't monetize your game.
Obviously, you'll soon find out that This Mr. Warddell just hit every deduction point. Then he succeeded.
Note: Xiao Qin is a pseudonym in the text.
Author: Xinghui, Editor: Director of the Garden; Public Account: Hedgehog Commune
This article was originally published by @Hedgehog Commune and everyone is a product manager. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.